Rand Paul and the Civil Rights Act of 1964

Sensible libertarians acknowledge that a free market is not enough to end all racial discrimination — and that a certain amount of it is the price we pay for living in a free society. This is a fine argument to make as an abstract principle — but it isn’t a path to political victory.

The news media and blogosphere are all abuzz about Republican Rand Paul’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited businesses from discriminating against customers based on race or national origins. I confess to having conflicting reactions to Dr. Paul’s principled opposition to big government.

On the one hand, there is a very persuasive theoretical argument that free markets will punish irrational discrimination. Thomas Sowell’s Markets and Minorities(1981) makes the case that if Business “A” refuses to do business with 10% of its customer base, it is reducing its sales and profits; A’s competitors will benefit from having 10% more customers. Over time, A will suffer economically for irrational behavior, while its competitors will benefit.

Along with the economic costs and benefits, public accommodation laws like CRA64 also protected bigots from the economic consequences of their decisions. At least when A put out the sign “No Negroes served here,” you knew who the enemy was – and not to put money into A’s pocket. The “don’t buy where you can’t work” boycott campaigns of the 1920s through 1940s forced Northern department stores to hire black workers, at a time when governmental action was unthinkable. CRA64 drove such overt discrimination underground — making such a boycott strategy far harder to implement.

There is also plenty of real-world evidence that free markets were an enemy of racism. Especially in the South, state governments did not simply allow businesses to discriminate — they often required discrimination. The landmark decision Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which ruled that “separate but equal” was constitutional, involved a Louisiana law that punished railroad companies if they did not segregate their passengers. There were similar laws into the 1960s in many Southern states requiring segregation of interstate bus customers — hence, the Freedom Rider campaign, in which blacks used the whites-only lunch counter at the Greyhound station.

One could make the case that CRA64 was necessary to break a longstanding government policy of encouraging – even requiring – racial discrimination. It wasn’t just state governments, either. The federal government, starting with President Woodrow Wilson, segregated government offices and stopped accepting blacks into the Navy except in menial roles. In the 1930s and into the 1940s, the Federal Housing Authority, which subsidized the growth of suburban housing, strongly encouraged developers to add racially restrictive covenants to deeds – keeping some neighborhoods all-white by law.

Would free markets have been enough to break this long history of governmental force in support of racism? I would like to think so – but I also know that the libertarian solution requires a population of rational actors prepared to look out for their own economic interests. You let me know when you find a species that fits that model.

This isn’t an abstract concern; the discrimination that CRA64 sought to prohibit was widespread and profoundly destructive. I went to church with a man named Lindsay in California. He had some stories about what things were like before CRA64 similar to those that I have heard repeatedly from other blacks. In the 1950s, when Lindsay’s band went to perform in what is now politically correct Sonoma County, California, Lindsay often had to sleep in his car: there were no motels there that would rent to a black man.

Nor is this all ancient history. As recently as 1993, blacks were discriminated against in a Denny’s in Annapolis. How do we know that they were discriminated against for being black, and not because they were badly dressed? These were on-duty Secret Service agents attached to the president’s security detail – and you know the Secret Service is pretty demanding about dress code.

Did CRA64 reduce racial discrimination? Many liberals argue that such laws have an “educative” function – that by punishing stupid and destructive behavior, such laws teach people that racism is wrong. They send a strong and unmistakable message that the majority has standards of appropriate behavior that everyone must follow. If you want to argue that CRA64, representing majority will in the U.S. in 1964, is a legitimate use of governmental power, then a lot of other laws that are “educative” in their effects are equally legitimate: abortion bans, marijuana prohibition, and laws against homosexuality. Antidiscrimination laws impose the majority’s moral code on the minority (as do all laws). What makes CRA64 “educative” and those other laws “oppressive”? It’s only whose ox is being gored.

As I said at the beginning, I have conflicting feelings about antidiscrimination laws. Racism is offensive and contrary to scripture. Big government worked long and hard to create the level of racism against blacks; a certain amount of big government trying to eradicate it has a certain rough justice to it. But where does this end? Can government prohibit employment discrimination against people with facial piercings? Santa Cruz County, California, passed such an ordinance a few years ago. Is it “unfair” for restaurants to discriminate against people that haven’t bathed in weeks, and refuse them service? How dare they put up discriminatory signs like, “No shirts, no shoes, no service.” Why should a fashion modeling agency be allowed to discriminate against the obese and ugly?

Sensible libertarians acknowledge that a free market is not enough to end all racial discrimination — and that a certain amount of it is the price we pay for living in a free society. This is a fine argument to make as an abstract principle – but it isn’t a path to political victory.

Clayton E. Cramer teaches history at the College of Western Idaho. His most recent book is My Brother Ron: A Personal and Social History of the Deinstitutionalization of the Mentally Ill (2012). He is raising capital for a feature film about the Oberlin Rescue of 1858.

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1.
Principal Levine

On the one hand, there is a very persuasive theoretical argument that free markets will punish irrational discrimination. Thomas Sowell’s Markets and Minorities (1981) makes the case that if Business “A” refuses to do business with 10% of its customer base, it is reducing its sales and profits; A’s competitors will benefit from having 10% more customers. Over time, A will suffer economically for irrational behavior, while its competitors will benefit.

Specious reasoning. In a racist society, the penalty for catering to the discriminated against population is more likely greater than the amount of money generated by doing business with them. If white people won’t go to lunch counter A because blacks are served there, they’ll go to b, where blacks aren’t served. The 10% business that the restaurant attracts won’t make up for the 90% it loses. That’s just common sense, and historically and empirically demonstrable in segregated communities throughout the first half of the twentieth century. You’re both on crack and its making you see whatever you want to see in order to legitimate this ideological, but purely fantastical, reasoning.

Lastly, and here’s the obvious part. If a business could refuse to cater to people due to their physical characteristics, then the law was bound to service their request in removing the individual. Thus, city and state governments were complicit in segregation; they would need to be for it to work. That’s an obvious fact to anyone who has a passable knowledge of history, and why private businesses could not be allowed to discriminate against any population. If they could, the state apparatus would be on the line to back up their right to discriminate, and thus be complicit in the discrimination. Duh.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 should have been passed with the understanding that it needed to be seriously reviewed every few years. The slippery slope concerns were very valid. I would have voted for the bill because the good outweighed the bad—while still realizing it set a dangerous precedent. The legislators probably made the right decision, but they were still playing with fire. How was this law to be interpreted in the future in other circumstances? This was not a flippant question that should have been ignored. David Bernstein comments on a more recent interpretation of the law:

“How did a civil rights principle meant to aid African Americans and others who suffered grievous discrimination for generations come to protect the ‘right’ of Neo-Nazis to parade their Nazi wardrobes in a privately owned restaurant against the wishes of management? The short answer is that legislation and its interpretation doesn’t develop from a coherent set of moral principles, but instead based on who is able to persuade the legislatures and the courts to adopt the principles they prefer. The principle involved in Alpine Village case appears to be hostility to the rights of private property owners, not ‘civil rights.’”

Civil Rights Act of 1964 reserved and codified as solely restricted to African Americans does a great injustice to all of American society by virtue of the fact that it allows discriminatory effect upon all others: it is an act of exclusion vs inclusion that does injustice to all who do not fall within the confines of the suspicious classes that was the reason for its passing.

At this moment, if the Obama government, headed by what appears to be an African American, was to discriminate against whites in administration of justice, there is no Civil Rights Act of 1964 who would protect whites, or any other minorities – male or female – not within the scope of the class meant to be advantaged by that act. There would be no protection for racial reverse-discrimination, a terrible flaw that by definition violates the 14th Amendment by co-opting its power for one select class.

The biggest problem with the 1964 Civil Rights Act is that it lead to racial quotas and ultimately institutionalized racial discrimination against working and middle class white people in academia, government, corporate America and so on.

The question in the early ’60′s was not whether the bill required quotas. The question was whether, regardless of any anti-quota provisions the bill might contain, it would LEAD to quotas. And, of course, it did–and far faster than its critics had anticipated. Immediately after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal enforcement agency created by the Act, declared that the failure of an employer to have the same percentage of blacks in his workforce as existed in the general population was prima facie proof of racial discrimination under the Act. As a result of this regulatory fiat, the only way an employer could prove he wasn’t racially discriminating was to engage in racially proportional hiring. The era of racial preferences had begun.

Fast forward to today and we have gone pass the percentage quota system to flat out discrimination against white people particularly those without the money or influence to buy their way into the system, namely working and middle class whites.

I remember one case of a manufacturer, who’s plant was located on a river, in a mostly white neighborhood. Across the river, but with no easy way to get to the plant, was a mostly black neighborhood.

The govt drew a 5 mile circle around the plant, decided that this neighborhood was X percent black. They then noticed that the plant’s employees were less than X percent black, and sued.

The circle drawn was something like 5 miles. The problem was that the people across the river had to travel something like 20 to 30 miles to get to the plant. The govt sued, and based on nothing more than the racial makeup of the nonsensical circle, the courts ruled that the company had been engaging in racial discrimination.

A white co-worker once told me the only reason I have my job is because I’m black. I simply smiled and said you only got the job because your white. He was perplexed.

The simple fact is Blacks have to compete against other minorities not whites. Nor do they take jobs away from whites. Black unemployment 18% White 8%. In any work environment the Black percentage is less than their population percentage. And vice versa for Whites.

My point is these so called quotas wouldn’t need to be in place if there wasn’t any White privilege. Hell white immigrants have an still do get jobs before Americans who happen to be Black.

If it weren’t for the Democrat’s Jim Crow laws, Rand Paul would have been right. But once the Democrat’s Jim Crow Laws forced everybody into segregated businesses, the argument was lost. It would sure be nice if Rand Paul would tell it like it was.

A great analogous example is no smoking laws. Since all the liberals who want smoke free know the businesses who just put up no smoking signs would lose the competitive race for business, they have to force every business to put up no smoking signs — Even thought many businesses don’t want to. Perfect example of why Democrats were forced to pass Jim Crow laws in the first place.

Once you look, you find Democrats have a fine, rich history with slavery and segregation. We should talk about it more often.

We know the history. We speak of the history. Rand Paul knows the History of the “Dixecrats”. Do you? That argument doesn’t benefit the so called conservatives or libertarians. How could it the Progressives pushed those racist pigs out of the party an the GOP welcomed them with open arms. Speak of that… Stop your home schooling.

This is a fine argument to make as an abstract principle — but it isn’t a path to political victory.

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The same argument can be made for every type of rent seeking supported by the govt.
Yes, welfare is wrong, but opposing it isn’t a path to political victory.
Yes, pork barreling is wrong, but opposing it isn’t a path to political victory.
Yes, …

No, my point is that at least part of why CRA64 was needed was because governments had spent a long time encouraging and often requiring racial discrimination. This wasn’t the only cause of it, but it certainly made the problem far worse. By comparison, discrimination against Asians and Hispanics, while it also has a history of government encouragement, was considerably less severe.

So, the logic is that the more government screws up, the more power it gets. Government support for discrimination led to necessity of Civil Rights Act, which then naturally evolved into government support for discrimination.

Yup, that’s the problem with giving government lots of power–its abuses inevitably lead to more government. My point in writing this article was to remind people that while there was a legitimate need for CRA64, it was because of previous governmental abuse of power. Is there still a case for it today? Not anywhere near as strong as there was in 1964, that’s for sure.

I got sick and tired of being discrimminated against whenever I went to a Asian-owned vegetable store (and they are ALL owned and operated by Asians in Toronto) I was treated rudely, made to wait while the owners/workers chatted amongst themselves in Chinese and was passed over twice in favour of Asian customers while I waited in line. Solution….I now buy my vegetables in the local grocery store. I pay a bit more, but am treated the same as everyone else. If you don’t like the service where you shop, there is always another store around the corner.

The right of The Wicked State to tell Cindy from Wasilla that she is not to refuse service to us Mac’s and O’s (or whatever similar category of folks) at her Ayn Rand Memorial lemonade-and-shoeshine stand has not much to do with educative functions, but a great deal to do with whether little missy expects the local Polizei to pick us up for trespassing, should we hang around anyway.

You have a good point about governmental enforcement of trespassing laws. (Although what this has to do with Sarah Palin eludes me.) But CRA64 often involved civil suits that had nothing to do with any overt governmental action. For example, Heart of Atlanta Motel (1964) did not involve any government action to remove trespassers.

Racial discrimination is irrational and Cramer is right on the mark as to why market forces do not always correct for this. For the most part they do. There is no law, for example requiring the ATM machine to offer instructions in Spanish, but they all do although there are few Spanish speakers where I live. Similarly the grocery store will carry a Kosher food section whenever the local Jewish population reaches the level where it becomes profitable even if there are an equal number of Jews and anti-semites in the community. The inclusion of Spanish instructions or Kosher food is just not enough to drive away the other customers although there are plenty of bigots among them and it has nothing to do with the law.

In ‘segregated communities’ in other words those who hold the irrational hatred of some group as a strongly felt belief people will act against their own economic or social interest so long as the belief persists. Once the belief is absent or weakened the market will predominate. The civil rights act broke the back of racism by attacking the outcome, not the source of the problem, but it has been effective.

So both Sowell and Principal Levine are correct. I think Sammy Davis Jr., who certainly knew what he was talking abut, said it best “Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to go and get insulted.”

So whatever we want to say about civil and property rights, the Pauls are idiots. I say this as someone whe considers himself strongly libertarian.

Libertarianism in its pure form is as Utopian as socialism. Both depend on the goodness of human nature. I am libertarian by philosophy but a conservative pragmatic for this very reason. The Constitution is by and large a libertarian document and all the founders said it was written for an “educated and moral” electorate. Since Logic and Objectivism have been kicked out of the schools and God and a moral compass have been kicked out of the culture, laws have been made to compensate for the deficit. This will continue until the end of time unless and until the people turn back to objective truth and moral standards. In the mean time we have the current situation. The Constitution didn’t come first; moral men, educated in objective truth (history, science….)came first. Then they wrote the Constitution.

One of the central tenets of libertarianism is that humans are corrupt. Which is why we want to give other humans as little power over us as possible. The idea as that left to their own devices, most people will do what is their own economic interests.
If this assumption is faulty, then the only other solution is a big power govt that tells everyone what to do.

I agree with Ione, except when I reflect on the wonders of affirmative action. Make no mistake, every time someone is awarded something based on the color of his skin, another is denied.

Personally, its cost me nothing. It may have cost my kids a bit, they are not a privileged racial mix, nor do they have connections. I do wonder whether people who are given a leg up are competent, and before the chants of racist start, that applies equally to a GWB, or even a Drew Barrymore…

The search for cosmic justice continues, without me. I don’t share MLK’s dream – life’s unfair, and then you die.

I don’t claim to be a historian, attorney, or even be in the know of Rand Paul’s positions, other than what I’ve read the last couple of days.

But if I own and have paid for a piece of personal property, say a rental house, I should have every right to discriminate in any way I see fit. If that is what Paul is referring, I’m with him – screw the Fair Housing Act portion of Civil Rights Act. Whatever the original intent, I know of at least two occasions where the homeowner was threatened with suit, consented, then got burned by thousands of dollars in damage and was left holding the bag – including a clean up of meth residue. Uncle Sammy’s local do gooders didn’t volunteer to help afterward, as the fine group of “bangers” went looking for their next owner/victim.

If I don’t like the color of your hair, much less your skin, I ought to have the right to tell you “NO”, you will not rent my house period and not be required to stipulate why.

You can interview your prospective tenants, run credit reports an such. You can spot a deadbeat. Which is totally legal. But not by their natural god given characteristics. If you do you should be sued.

The CRA could have been passed without the sections dealing with the private sector. This would have eliminated discrimination in public (that is, tax-supported) services, and all laws REQUIRING private segregation. It could also have eliminated the enforcement of discriminatory covenants. It would have eliminated Jim Crow laws. It would not have infringed upon the rights of private property.

It is possible that this would have been insufficient to remedy the problems the CRA was designed to remedy. But it seems to me that the burden of proof lies on those making that claim, not on those doubting it. Was it really NECESSARY to destroy the rights of property owners? Even if that were true, shouldn’t the experiment have been tried?

I am inclined to agree that prohibiting governmental discrimination and voiding all laws that required private discrimination would have been preferable–and might have led (perhaps more slowly) to the situation we are in today, where racial discrimination continues to happen in private businesses, but is certainly much rarer than in 1964.

I don’t know any libertarian who would argue that the free market is perfect.
I don’t know any rational person who would argue that govt markets are perfect.

Now the question is this; Is the free market less imperfect than govt solutions.

All one has to do to answer this question is look around you. World over, those countries that have adopted more govt, are doing more worse than those countries that are freer.

Now to the specific question at hand. Will the free market eliminate more racism than does the govt edict model?

Once again, just look around you. After 40 years, the evidence is in. Having govt order everyone to play nice, has not worked. Instead, what has happened is what always happens when govt sets up a racial spoils system. Instead of coming together, govt forces people to think of their race first. I commend to you anything written by Thomas Sowell on the subject.

Is the current system worse than the days of Jim Crow? Hard to say. Black’s weren’t allowed to shop in white businesses, so they created their own businesses.

Were there poor blacks in the days of Jim Crow? Yes.
Were there poor whites in the days of Jim Crow? Yes.
Are there poor blacks today? Yes.

Were there black millionaires in the days of Jim Crow? Yes.

Govt statisitics shows that blacks were making economic progress, even in the darkest days of Jim Crow. Govt statistics also show that in recent decades, that progress has not only stopped, but been reversed.

Have racial attitudes improved since the CRA was signed? I don’t think anyone will be able to find any statistics that show it has.

It is self evident that Jim Crow, that system of laws passed because in the opinion of people who ran the govt, citizens weren’t being racist enough, was evil.
It is also self evident that what the CRA has been turned into, is equally evil.

In my opinion, it is self evident, that we all, blacks, whites, and every other racial group, would have been much better off had the Feds limited themselves to crushing the Jim Crow laws.

There’s no question that if CRA64 had not interfered with private property rights, property rights would be healthier. We might have seen a dramatic decline in private discrimination anyway–the country was moving that way. But purity of belief doesn’t win elections.

Flat out bullsh*t. who did this study you speak of? Not the NAACP, not the congressional Black caucus. Not any Black studies professor. Fact is Blacks are doing better today as a direct result of Federal laws. Which is the reason you all hate gov’t.. If you self righteous libertarians were real you would have stood with the civil rights leaders. Because the real issue was the terrorism not lunch counters.

Especially in the South, state governments did not simply allow businesses to discriminate — they often required discrimination.

This is a key point that needs to be brought up over and over again: the main factor sustaining racism coming into the 1960′s, was government intervention. By its nature, government discrimination flatly contradicts the principle of equality before the law, and in this respect, legal action was the proper (and overdue) solution.

The real topic raised by Rand Paul, however, is racism on the part of private individuals. *That* is the part of the CRA64 that advocates of liberty question, and for good reason. Racism on the part of individuals is a cultural, not legal phenomenon — not unlike stupidity, or being left wing — and is a completely different beast.

In a free society, governments act by permission; the individual is sovereign, and acts by right. The government may only act where positively given the privilege, by law; individuals may act as they choose *except* where forbidden by law (ideally, only where such action infringes upon the liberty of another.)

IMO no commentary that fails to acknowledge this key distinction in addressing Rand Paul’s comments is even on topic, let alone credible.

Would free markets have been enough to break this long history of governmental force in support of racism?

No. The two are incommensurable; it is not the job of free markets to write laws. That requires legislative action, based on free market, pro-individualist ideology. That is what was needed, and long overdue — and notwithstanding its flaws, the CRA achieved this goal.

Free markets operate in the private domain, among individuals. What they DO break is private, cultural racism, by various mechanisms, only one of which (“my money is just as green as the next guy’s”) is cited here. It is not the only one, nor the most powerful. Free market liberalism include the marketplace of ideas and of education. These are the forces which drive culture — not laws (to the eternal chagrin of authoritarians everywhere).

It is this process which is impeded by government actions, both before and after the CRA — and has since been reversed by the Left.

And now we come to this article’s fatal weakness: as sound as many of its points are, it remains undercut by the epistemological and moral pragmatism of its conservative author:

On the one hand, there is a very persuasive theoretical argument that free markets will punish irrational discrimination.

Notwithstanding the evidence provided right here that clearly establishes that this “theory” is in fact perfectly good in practice, citing an argument’s theoretical or “abstract” aspect as a disqualifier in and of itself, is the hallmark of someone who, leery of principled reasoning, automatically distrusts its results.

… but I also know that the libertarian solution requires a population of rational actors prepared to look out for their own economic interests. You let me know when you find a species that fits that model.

Humanity. *tada*

Or did Cramer mean “requires a population of 100% rational actors? Well, that’s a horse of a different color. That is a basic assumption of a certain view of free markets, a highly rationalistic one which does not and cannot account for free will.

Here, Cramer is citing an invalid theory to back up his suspicion of *all* “abstract” theory, even a well-substantiated one. Moreover, he muddies the water by engaging in some subtle switcheroos between the two separate issues of government versus private discrimination (by asking whether free markets would act against *government* racism).

So where does this end up? Why, exactly where all pragmatists end up:

Sensible libertarians acknowledge that a free market is not enough to end all racial discrimination — and that a certain amount of it is the price we pay for living in a free society. This is a fine argument to make as an abstract principle – but it isn’t a path to political victory.

…. abandoning moral principle to political expediency and the pursuit of power, of course.

…. abandoning moral principle to political expediency and the pursuit of power, of course.

—-

Isn’t this how the Republican leadership got us into this mess in the first place?

Beyond the points made above about merchants only caring about the color of their customers money let add another point.

Any employer who refuses to hire blacks hurts himself in two ways.
1) By artificially restricting his supply of labor, he has increased his cost of labor vis-a-vis any competitor who doesn’t hobble himself.
2) By artificially restricting his supply of labor, he runs the risk of refusing to hire the best people available. Leaving those people for his competitors to hire.

And #3, which was mentioned in the article: by refusing to hire people of a certain group, he invites retaliatory action by members of that group and those sympathetic to them, who do not wish to do business with bigots.

Political victory for what? More of the same. Rand Paul made it clear that he is absolutely against government discrimination on any basis. He is also against private discrimination. It’s just that the government doesn’t have the constitutional power to address it. There is something about freedom of association. But the government discriminates anyway against white males. They don’t complain but about 62% of them vote Republican who appear to be less race conscious- not that they have ever done anything against discrimination against white males.

As I recall, Goldwater (whom I (and supposedly Hillary, too) voted for, gulp) opposed the CR legislation, and that stand was one of the major issues which contributed to the landslide against him. It is hard to see that level of libertarianism ever winning a Presidential election in this country, and that “truth” also creates what a lot of loose cannons here call RINO’s. The times create the men more than the men create the times. It will be interesting to see how Rand Paul weathers this storm.

As a young man, I was beginning the process of moving left; as an older guy I am moving back toward the center, but a lot of the muttering nut jobs here make it clear why I will not be moving much further right. Another Goldwater line which sank him was, “extremism in the defense of freedom…is no vice.” Internet blatherers can go on and on as they prove here daily with extreme and absurd pronouncements about how bad Obama and the times are. Historical perspective means nothing to these people because it is all about the political crisis at hand and their own sense of drama. If you lived through the Vietnam War and its aftermath in this country, then you have some sense of what crisis is. Today, we have a recession and a liberal President, but one who apparently will be pragmatic and shift as he has to. He moved toward offshore drilling and is using drones; just imagine if he were a doctrinaire pacifistic-green.

Obama is NO pragmatist. If he was a pragmatist, he would have abandoned his push for the HCR because the majority of Americans didn’t want it. Remember Clinton when he tried to push health care “reform”. Americans didn’t want it then either and Clinton backed off, turned back towards the center. Obama has started left and goes farther left in every policy he puts forward.

“Sensible libertarians acknowledge that a free market is not enough to end all racial discrimination — and that a certain amount of it is the price we pay for living in a free society. This is a fine argument to make as an abstract principle – but it isn’t a path to political victory.”

Sensible libertarians (and conservatives) recognize that the only thing that can end a person’s discrimination is a that person’s willingness to see the discrimination as an error. No amount of laws can make a man change his mind, but through his private transactions it can make a man change his mind. Don’t say this is not so: I for one used to be a black man who dove head first into racial politics, but something I said to another white person on a blog board made me stop and think how wrong I was. I told that man, “Sins of the father for white folks”, meaning that Whites born today are to bear the burdens of whites from so many years ago. That is the most bigoted and hateful thing I have ever said to another individual and I stopped to think that it is not fair to hold another hostage to the hateful era that preceded both of us.

Yeah, but changing a wrong behavior is a lot. We can never know what is in a man’s heart, so we have to make judgments based on his actions. I will take the bigot without the bigoted actions over a bigot with bigoted actions any day.

Sure its not about guilt. No White should feel bad about the past especially if they are Irish or another benign group of Whites. Its about economic empowerment.Its about the head start. It’s about those who have benefited from a society that oppressed some people with the use of laws. It’s about how they amassed political power by denying others that same power to choose or be represented. Its about property rights… When those European immigrants came through Elis island they knew they were coming to a place where Apartheid benefited them… No guilt. I just want my 40 acres!

So how do you construct a libertarian argument to support Civil Rights laws?

Racism itself is abhorrent on a gut level to the majority of us these days in the US these days. That is positive moral progress from the evil days of yore. Yet ‘majority’ or how we personally feel about someone else’s obvious stupidity are not libertarian arguments. You can be as self-destructive, idiotic, or whatever so so long as you do not infringe on the basic liberty of others. Libertarians accept that suboptimal social outcomes may occur at the expense of the treasured moral and political price of unacceptable infringement of our one clear natural right – individual liberty.

Real libertarians are the least racist people in the world. As individualists they do not care about nonsense such as melanin content, where you came from or any of that.

That turns out to be very difficult in practice.

So say I am Balbonian in Winnata which has a lot of restrictions such that Balbonians cannot buy property, own a business, or get a professional license based on my origin. The doors to the local shops have large signs in front saying “No Balbonins allowed here” Well the individual store and business owners have created a hostile environment and I cant open my coffee shop, buy a house, cannot even go the the one next door and get a latte. There is no way I can live here. My individual rights mean nothing. Kristallnacht is one example which led to…

Each individual in that environment is within their own property right. They have created a democratic system which helps them to enforce that. Let us take the laws away. We need politicians and lawyers for that.

What do politicians do? Well ‘abandoning moral principle to the pursuit of power’ is what they do best. It does sometimes get results. Something gets done anyway.

My question is this; is the concept of ‘libertarian politician’ an oxymoron?

I don’t think there is a libertarian argument for civil rights laws. There is a libertarian argument that in the absence of governmental encourage or coercion, a free market will lead to a less discriminatory market than a regulated market. It just isn’t going to be blindingly fast in how it operates, and unsurprisingly, people who feel abused by bigots aren’t likely to vote for someone who is delivering spellbinding speeches about the superiority of freedom.

There is a libertarian argument that in the absence of governmental encourage or coercion, a free market will lead to a less discriminatory market than a regulated market. It just isn’t going to be blindingly fast in how it operates …

This seems to be naive with too much confidence in the goodness of man. If history has not shown us anything it has shown that human nature without laws lead to one group dominate another. This pattern would also follow in a free market without consequences for immoral and unjust acts.

There is no such thing as a free market without consequences, even in a world without any govt, consequences would still exist.

Of course there are always consequences. I would assume in the context of what I said, “… a free market without consequences for immoral and unjust acts.” you would know I was talking about consequences in the form of punishment for breaking the law.

My father, who was born in 1930, always said that he didn’t care who hated him, he only cared for the equal application of the law. He said you didn’t need a Voting Rights Act, you just need enforcement of the 15th Amendment. U.S. Grant did this in New Orleans. There were more blacks elected to public office between 1865-1880 than any other period. The Solid South of Jim Crow was built by The failure of the Feds to uphold federal law.

It isn’t “goodness of man” but greed that reduces irrational discrimination in a free market. The problem is that there are plenty of people whose hatred takes precedence over their greed.

Yes, but greed and hatred are only two examples of the many that plague human nature, which is why believing people without laws/government regulations will tend to do what is right is a pipe dream. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m no liberal that believes the government should interfere and solve all our problems. And currently I believe there is way too much government involvement in our lives, however the libertarian position is the other extreme.

And if you want to defeat someone like Mussolini, you better find a way to defuse the desire of the majority to have trains running on time, or find a way to do it yourself. Purity doesn’t win elections.

No system is 100% pure in its ideology. There are always exceptions, so likewise this should be an exception. It is not about the government telling everyone everything that they can do in their private practice, but it is telling them that discrimination because of race, sex, and beliefs is not allowed. But not only that, there are other illegals acts that you are not allowed to commit in your private business or on your private property. This is necessary and good in pluralistic society to prevent the majority from dominating the minority.

Banning private behavior on private property is a perfect example of the majority dominating the minority.

It is only a contradiction if you believe every law is an act of the majority dominating the minority. And of course this depends on how you define “dominating”. I was speaking of dominating not in the sense of imposing any laws on someone, but a majority that has all the economic power and resources. This majority could refuse to allow those not in their click to have an equal and fair opportunity to do likewise.

Banning private behavior on private property is a perfect example of the majority dominating the minority.

Not a contradiction, unless you believe every law is an instance of the majority dominating the minority. It all turns on what was meant by “dominating”. In my case I was referring to dominating in the sense of one group having controlled over economic resources and refusing those not in the click a equal and fair chance to compete.

Nobody in this country loves the Republicans. On the other hand, there is a small cadre of true believers who love and will do anything (and I do mean anything) to help them win.

On those occassions when the Republicans do manage to win, it isn’t because they have won the heart and soul of the voting public, it’s because the Democrats have scared the sh*t out of them and they run to the only option they view as viable.

The reason for this is simple. Democrats stand for something. The only core principle behind the Republican party is winning. What they are going to do when they win is anyone’s guess.

When Republicans are in power, even when they have large numbers, do they EVER roll back any of the programs put forth by the Democrats? Of course not. They may try, but the instant the feel any opposition, they roll over and play dead. Protecting their future viability is more important than protecting the future of the country.

As the Democrats have shown, they are willing to push their agenda, their morals, even when the vast majority of the country is against them.

The existence of Republicans like Mr. Cramer are the reason why I feel that this country is doomed. The health care bill will not be repealed, it will be trimmed ever so slightly, and the Republican leadership will declare victory. It’s better to look good, and receive the accolades of the MSM than it is to do good.

Markthegreat. Its been fun watching you run into an author who is actually capable of logical reasoning here. Watching you told to shut up and sit down by people you think will back up your authoritarian boot-licking has been a pleasure. I disagree with Clayton on many issues. But what I do respect about him is that he relies on logic, documentation and reason. Literally, all the things that are kryptonite to small minds like yours.

Mark’s problem isn’t a small mind. It’s enthusiasm for a beautiful theory without recognizing that reality sometimes bites. I used to share Mark’s enthusiasm for the beautiful theory of libertarianism. But completing my BA and MA in History–and a few years of living in the San Francisco Bay Area–pretty well tempered all of that with reality.

I’ve read about the Alabama incident a couple of days before I read this article. As I did so, an interesting thought just hit me: why were there two separate groups of Secret Service agents, one white and one black?

I clearly doubt that it was because of deliberate segregation–most likely it was the result of self-segregation, but there could have been other reasons for it–but what would have happened had the two groups themselves been mixed? And what mitigating effect would the mixture have had on the racism in that restaurant–not just for that one incident, but in the long term as well?

I got into an argument about this on a blog, where we discussed a “chicken and egg” problem of blacks giving low tips, because they get bad service…but when the servers see blacks as low-tippers, they give bad service. If blacks and whites were together, and the group got good service, could it be that the blacks in the group would have been inclined to give bigger tips? And would this not, in turn, affect the service of blacks, as a group, in general? Perhaps not, but it’s impossible to say.

I, for one, think that the “Separate but Equal” decision was a bad one, but so was the “Civil Rights Act”. The First should have determined that Jim Crow laws were unconstitutional; the second should have made Jim Crow laws federally illegal, and thus null and void. In either case, we would have opened the door for the free market to work on solutions.